Christa Maiwald
I inherited my love of sweets from my Viennese father. In graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago, I started doing sculptures and performances involving food – a five-foot tower of pancakes, words spelled out in peanuts for squirrels to eat, and making dehydrated space food capsules as my diet for a week.
Now, as an adult artist spending most of my time indoors embroidering artworks or baking for myself and my employer, looking out at the landscape has become bittersweet. That's when I came up with the idea for the landscape cakes.
Each season inspires ideas for cakes to make and then return to the outdoor situation to be photographed. When exhibited, the photo of the cake hangs on the wall and cake is either on view for the duration of the show (refrigerated each night) or eaten at the opening. My intense love of nature has finally come full circle, and sharing the cake with people means we can all take a bite out of the outdoors .
John Haubrich
When I was three, I picked up a pencil and began to draw. My parents, who found this interesting, provided me with a table and chairs on which to work. In our family kitchen, at my table, I would draw for hours.
Growing up in rural Minnesota, I had a physical and emotional connection with the large skies and expansive landscape of this region of the country. Along with this response to the natural world was a further affinity with the abandoned farms, the rusted cars and farm equipment, and the sense of the past that permeated this world.
The expansiveness of vision, the large landscapes I physically inhabited, brought me to painting. Here in gesture, color, and form, I could articulate my visual experiences, and emotional responses to my life in a physical world. Abstraction allows me the opportunity to create landscape that is a physical, rational response to external and internal experiences.
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